Anaheim teen's ‘Grand' movie break

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When an email arrived from Paris with news that would change Tony Revolori's life in ways that until then he could only imagine, the 17-year-old actor from Anaheim felt a rush of mixed emotions.

“I just remember feeling so happy and excited and in pain,” Revolori says of receiving the message from director Wes Anderson offering him a major role in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

The first two emotions make perfect sense, of course. But pain?

Revolori smiles and says, “I jumped up so hard in the car I hit my head on the roof, and it really hurt.”

He was with his father and brothers in their well-traveled Toyota Camry, driving as they did three or four times a week to auditions in Los Angeles. That's important to the moment, too, for since Revolori was a toddler he and his older brother Mario had pursued the actor's dream, landing small parts in commercials, TV shows and movies.

Many times he and Mario went up for the same roles. As it happened, Mario had been a finalist for the same part in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” But it was Tony who ended up with the part this time and what a part it was.

As Zero Moustafa the Lobby Boy, Revolori appears in nearly every frame of the film, more than holding his own in a cast that includes at least 15 Oscar winners or nominees, such as Ralph Fiennes, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, F. Murray Abraham, Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton and Edward Norton.

The email is still saved on his phone, not that he's going to forget one word of it: “He says, ‘Hello, Tony, I would like to officially offer you the role of Zero.' ”

Despite the the old-fashioned “And introducting ... ” credit Revolori gets for “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” he's actually been introducing himself to casting directors, agents and the rest of the Hollywood for most of his life.

He doesn't remember much about his first acting gig other than that he was 2 and he and Mario played elves on the lap of a Santa played by former NBA star Baron Davis in a TV ad.

“It felt normal to me to be doing these things since I did it from a very young age,” Revolori says. “I remember when I was 12, talking with my friends about what we wanted to do with our lives, astronauts, forensic detectives, all these different jobs. And the only thing I could think was an actor.”

In July 2012, the Revolori brothers' agency sent them to an audition for an untitled Wes Anderson project so hush-hush they weren't allowed to see the script until they arrived. Two weeks later, both got called back to another round of auditions.

A few days later, only Tony got invited to fly by himself to Paris to meet Anderson in person.

For the next two months, Anderson coached Revolori on the script, sending videos back and forth over the Internet. When his phone buzzed that afternoon in the car and he saw it was an email from Anderson, he thought it was simply more notes on the script.

“He had been searching for this character for months before he even came to the states,” says Revolori, whose family comes from Guatemala, of Anderson's initial quest for an actor of Middle Eastern descent to play Zero. “He was looking in Israel, Lebanon, North Africa, and all of Europe to try to find the person he wanted.

“And finally in L.A., in this little town of Anaheim, that's where he found his guy.”

In January 2013, Revolori and his father, Mario Revolori Sr., flew to Germany and the town of Görlitz on the border with Poland where the movie was shot over the next few months.

“At these family dinners that we had every night you do get that feeling of, ‘Wow, this is really happening,' because you see all of them together at one place, having normal conversations together,” he says of his famous costars. “You feel kind of that sense of awe.”

He does admit to being a bit nervous on meeting Fiennes at a costume fitting in Berlin a few months before shooting started. He saw him not only as the sadistic Nazi in “Schindler's List,” but as a child of the Harry Potter generation he knew him even more as evil Lord Voldemort.

“When I got in he was halfway through his fitting and he turns and smiles and walks over and gives me a big hug,” Revolori says. “He's played such intense characters, you kind of think the man is what he plays, but no, he's so generous, so nice, and I was really, really fortunate to work alongside him.”

Meeting Bill Murray, one of Anderson's regular actors, might have been more anxiety provoking for his father, Revolori says.

“He turned to my dad the first day that we're meeting and says, “I've thrown some stage parents into a pool before because they were annoying – don't be an annoying stage parent!' ” he says.

At the end of Murray's week of shooting he told Tony that his dad was an all-right guy – no dunking necessary.

“I said, ‘You can still do it if you want to because that would be a really cool story!' ”

In February, “The Grand Budapest Hotel” opened the Berlin Film Festival, and eventually won the grand jury prize, and Revolori flew there for a reunion with Anderson and much of the cast and crew.

More movie promotion followed at screenings around the country and through interviews with reporters from around the world as well as an appearance on NBC's “Last Call with Carson Daly.”

He's already shot a second movie, an Indian film called “Umrika” in which he costars with Suraj Sharma, who played the title role in “Life of Pi.”

“I'm a normal working actor – just the way I want it,” he says. “I have never been the one to want the fame of everything. The thing for me is to inspire people and do something I love.”

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